The increasing demand for constant personal communication has resulted in the availability of phones in just about any location imaginable. Wireless or mobile phones have enabled individuals to communicate while roaming in a variety of dynamic environments, such as airplanes, cars, restaurants, and other public and private places. Furthermore, wireline phones, such as public pay phones, can be found in a variety of different environments, such as airports, train stations, stores, and gas stations, among others. These and other such environments are associated with considerable ambient or background noise which makes it difficult to clearly transmit and receive intelligible speech at an audible level.
As a result, the individuals on a phone conversation may often have to repeat themselves, which is inconvenient, time-consuming, inefficient and costly. Alternatively, they may shout or raise their voices to be heard over the noise, which compromises the privacy of the conversation. A person in a noisy environment may also increase the volume of the phone in order to better hear the person who is speaking on the other end.
Manually adjusting the volume level in response to loud background noise is tedious for both the individual at the speaking end and the individual at the listening end. In addition, increasing the volume level of a phone user's speech has the undesirable effect of increasing the volume of the background noise in the user's environment. Furthermore, manually increasing volume in response to background noise is undesirable since the volume must be later manually decreased to avoid acutely loud reception when the background noise dies down.
Indeed, within a given environment, the level of the background noise may fluctuate; for example, in a car, the background noise may vary depending on a number of external factors, such as the amount of traffic, the speed of the car, the output of the car stereo, the engine, the type of road, and other variable factors. In such an environment, manually adjusting the volume in response to each instance that the background noise increases or decreases is not only tedious but distracting as well and can endanger the safety of those in the vehicle as well as those in the vehicle's path.